Max Morath (1926-2023) would have been 97 today; he passed away just three months ago.
Morath was both an entertainer and an educator, and definitely a crucial figure linking the original ragtime era to our own. Morath was born over a decade after ragtime's heyday. By the time he was listening to popular music, it was the Paul Whiteman era. He only discovered the music of Scott Joplin, Eubie Blake, Irving Berlin etc and others later when he was involved with theatre groups putting on old time melodramas in his native Colorado. Piano accompaniment was one of the pillars of the mellers, although the music employed there was usually of a pre-ragtime hinky-tonk sort. His first records in the mid '50s were recorded live at the Gold Bar Room in Cripple Creek. A representative LP from that time is Music for Moochers, Gold Diggers, and Cattle Rustlers (1957).
In 1959 Morath produced a series of programs for public television called This is Ragtime. Produced in Denver, the shows were distributed nationally, and syndicated for years afterward. In the early '60s, he moved to New York, where he performed with his original Rag Quartet at clubs like The Village Vanguard and the Blue Angel. The ragtime revival was a decade off, but there was a flourishing Dixieland scene in NYC at the time, two of the best known veterans of which were Woody Allen and George Segal. Morath toured nationally with a series of ragtime shows for nearly four decades, released three dozen record albums, and appeared on national TV shows like The Bell Telephone Hour, The Arthur Godfrey Show, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and Kraft Music Hall. He also composed his own ragtime music, and wrote books, plays, screenplays, and scholarly articles. He was very influential. I'm not sure if we would have had a Marvin Hamlisch (at least not the same one) without him.
Here are some lovely tributes:
New York Times
Syncopated Times
Rocky Mountain PBS
The Gazette (Colorado)
Pioneer Press
Duluth News Tribune
Colorado Music Hall of Fame
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